


Idle Minds

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [20]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Backstory, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-01
Updated: 2016-03-01
Packaged: 2018-05-24 01:34:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6136741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bringing Miss Giddy to the Vault is like bringing a lit match to an oil-soaked rag.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Idle Minds

Capable was the one who brought Miss Giddy to them. Not in any direct way, of course, but she was the one who said, meekly as a mouse, “Maybe if we knew how to read we could understand you better. Maybe if we knew these things, Cheedo could answer you better.”

Ilaria had grunted, her eyes narrowing. Joe had stared at Capable so long that the girl hunched away, pulled at the translucent linen around her shoulders.

“An idea like that means you’ve got too much idle time on your hands.” Joe grumbled, and his hyena muttered along with him.

“Idle minds make for idle hands,” she said, her voice low and thick in her chest. She turned and spat something out into the pool. None of the Wives wanted to look at it more closely.

“I’ll speak to my Imperators,” Joe grunted, patting his daemon’s head. “And I’ll hear nothing else about it from you.”

 

They brought her up from the Wretched, her raven missing his tail feathers and her legs shaking so badly she could barely walk. The words written on her skin were dusty, some lost to old scars, all of them frail and wrinkled as the books piled high around the Vault.

When the Dag saw her, coming down the Vault’s tunnel on the arm of an Imperator, she gasped. Pheona sat up straight as a board, the fur on her back bristling. “Sorrow,” the fox whispered. “She looks just like Sorrow.”

“Maybe there’s some starlight in the world yet,” the Dag said, crouching to hold her daemon close and watch the old woman hobble over to one of the Vault’s chairs.

“Do you need anything?” Capable asked, the first to step forward, one had outstretched as if to support the woman’s trembling shoulders.

“I… I could use a glass of water.” The lady was staring around the Vault, taking in the plush carpets and cushions, the running water of the pool. For once, Angharad was not watching broodingly after the retreating Imperator, not watching the Vault door swing shut with sullen rage across her face. Instead, she watched the new prisoner, and her daemon looked almost more curious than angry.

Capable fetched the water for her, and all of them watched the old lady gulp it down, desperate and half-dead and Wretched.

“What do we call you?” Toast asked, as gentle as any of them had ever heard her be. Capable took the empty glass and, without a word, went to fill it up again.

The lady chuckled at Toast’s question, and her raven cawed out a rough cackle that could have doubled as a death cry. “Been a long time since anyone asked me that,” she coughed, and paused to swallow the second glass of water, only slightly less desperate than before. “If you’re going to be my students like that Imperator said, you’d better call me Miss.”

“Giddy,” the raven said, as hoarse and raucous as before. “Miss Giddy. And I’m Leander.”

 

First, Miss Giddy told them stories. Cheedo was let out for lessons; it was for her sake as much as anyone’s that Joe had fetched the old History Woman. (So that Cheedo could understand the alethiometer’s answers, because he couldn’t keep her blind and deaf forever and expect her to know what the world looked and sounded like.) They sat on uncomfortable wooden chairs in front of a blackboard none of them had known the name or the use for until now. Chalk, at least, was one thing common in the Citadel, and like everything the Wives were granted it was an endless supply.

She told them, mostly, stories from her skin. All of them thought it would be the Dag who was her most devoted student, who had already started to follow the old woman’s example. Who had even (when asked) held Capable’s slender hand in hers and pricked a rune from a book along her finger.

But it was Angharad who listened with unwavering intensity to Miss Giddy’s lessons, Adara’s usual indifference vanishing in the face of her stories. The lioness sat at her human’s side and kneaded sharp claws against the stone floor, scraping lighter tracks in the rock. Miss Giddy didn’t tell them stories of the end of the world, or the dying times that swallowed them up afterwards. She told stories of what had happened _before_ that. How men in power knew exactly what they were doing when they poisoned the water, heated up the ocean. How they knew exactly what would happen if things went too far, and they pushed beyond those limits anyway. How stupid, careless politics brought down nuclear missiles to dissolve what was left of each others’ control, and up grew the Wasteland in their wake. Like some grotesque insect devouring its own skin.

Capable was the one who could bring words to emotions, who could calm the storms that Toast flew into, could tell what was wrong when the Dag bit her lips until they bled. But it was Miss Giddy who knew how to articulate what they were feeling, who could pick them up and say, _This is wrong. What’s been done to you is wrong, and terrible. Here is how he did it, so that it can never happen again_.

Except it still happened.

Except it was still happening.

But the words helped anyway. Angharad learned to ask her questions and Miss Giddy knew the answers: _Who killed the world? We did. They did. He did._ And Capable learned how he had manipulated and abused and objectified them down into boxes that they would not fill, because they were not things. And for the Dag (and for Cheedo, who found these lessons hardest to bear) Miss Giddy had other stories. No less cutting, but more poignant for their distance from reality. She told them stories about a fireman who thought that burning books meant freedom, until he read one. (That was how she started Cheedo learning her letters.) And she told them stories about a woman who had everything taken away from her; child, husband, job, freedom. (She had to explain that, before the end, people had worked for a thing called money. Sometimes they had even liked it. The principle of the story was that there had been a _choice_. Until there wasn’t.) But that even when everything was taken away, a human being was still left. Even valued only for her womb, not a hero or anyone special at all, just a woman who was more than a thing. (She escaped, at the end of the story, and was put down in history, like the history Miss Giddy carried on her skin. Perhaps it was this, more than anything, that made Angharad turn to the Vault windows and look out over the Wasteland. Made her think, _anywhere is better than here_ , and _I wouldn’t mind dying as long as it was in the open._ )

Miss Giddy was old, and had very little fire left in her. Without the Wives, she would never have had a reason to remember that they had all been something _more_. Without Miss Giddy, the Wives would never have known it to begin with. They were full of fire, even Cheedo who was so afraid that her dread felt like quicksand sucking at her heels. Mixed together, it was a thing inevitable that they would explode.


End file.
